Pun Ngai is Assistant Professor in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is coeditor of Remaking Citizenship in Hong Kong: Community, Nation, and the Global City and the founder and chair of the Chinese Working Women Network, a grassroots organization of migrant women factory workers in China.

For more information regarding the Chinese Working Women Network, please click here.

MADE IN CHINA

Women Factory Workers in a Global WorkplaceBy PUN NGAI

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2005 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-932643-18-3

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………ixIntroduction……………………………………………………………………………11 State Meets Capital: The Making and Unmaking of a New Chinese Working Class…………………232 Marching from the Village: Women’s Struggles between Work and Family……………………….493 The Social Body, the Art of Discipline and Resistance…………………………………….774 Becoming Dagongmei: Politics of Identities and Differences………………………………..1095 Imagining Sex and Gender in the Workplace……………………………………………….1336 Scream, Dream, and Transgression in the Workplace………………………………………..1657 Approaching a Minor Genre of Resistance…………………………………………………189Notes………………………………………………………………………………….197References……………………………………………………………………………..205Index………………………………………………………………………………….219

Chapter One

STATE MEETS CAPITAL: THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF A NEW CHINESE WORKING CLASS

We are a mass of dagongzai Coming from the north, coming from the west At first we didn’t know what dagongzai meant Now we know, toiling from the sunrise to the sunset Toiling with drops of blood and sweat Selling our labor to the boss, selling our bodies to the factory Do what they dictate to you, no negotiation, no bargaining, but obey Money is the magic, and what the capitalists bestow on you A commodity, a commodity -A worker’s poem found in the factory dormitory

I found the above verse, written with a ballpoint pen, on the wall of a men’s dorm room at the Meteor plant when I stayed in the factory dormitory in late 1995. I was attracted by the verse at first glance, and I made numerous inquiries to locate its author, but to no avail. No one staying in the room would admit that they had written it, but rather suggested to me that the writer might already have left or that somebody might have copied the verse from a magazine. But the workers all said they loved the graffiti, emphasizing that the poem helped to “speak to their real situation and their life as underdogs.” Indeed, during one such inquiry, four workers in the room circled around me and complained persistently: “We are not treated as human beings, you don’t get it lady. We work like dogs and never stop. When the superior asks you to work, you have to work no matter when and where…. Who cares who you are? We are nobody, we are stuff.” Although I was struck by the articulateness of their class positions, I protested and did not hesitate to argue: “You are dagongzai, you are certainly not nobody.” Surprised by my seriousness, the workers fell into laughter and said, “What is dagongzai? Dagongzai is worth nothing. Dagongzai is only disposable stuff (feiwu).”

It is this painful confusion of Chinese migrant workers regarding their class positions and class consciousness that compelled me to try to make sense of the class struggles in contemporary China. A language of class paradoxically was emptied out, like a phantom of the past yearning to be alive even though it was dead. I was perplexed trying to understand the strange but cruel lived experience of class that was very acute for the Chinese workers and yet not discussed. The discourse of class was not only displaced by the hegemonic project of Chinese modernity but also widely abhorred by the common people, not only in the newly emerged urban middle class but sometimes in the working class itself. In this chapter, my first task is to figure out a geneaology of class, from Mao’s China to the postsocialist period, contrasting the daily struggles of the workers in urban industrialized areas in order to make sense of the trope of “making and unmaking” of the Chinese working class in the reform age. My contention here is that this discursive dyslexia of class has a tremendous effect on policy and institutional controls on population and labor issues in China, and may not only constrain labor mobility, work opportunities, and settlement patterns but also the formation of the working class itself. We see a new Chinese working class struggling to be born at the very moment that the language of class has been sentenced to death. Indeed, the formation of a new working class in contemporary China has been checked structurally by these discursive and institutional effects.

The second focus of this chapter is to highlight the fact that the notions of class, class consciousness, and class struggle are highly contested, requiring sophisticated theorizing based on in-depth historical and ethnographic studies. In postsocialist China, we still cannot observe systematic and collective class struggles with formal political agendas working against state and capital, but this does not mean that there is no class consciousness germinating in this rapidly shifting society. As I demonstrate below, in China’s first special economic zone, Shenzhen, a new generation of migrant workers has rapidly developed a range of examples of class awareness and understanding in the workplace. To situate this concrete daily struggle of class, and the processes of making and unmaking of class in contemporary urban China, I will in the pages following probe the change from a village commune into an industrialized zone in Shenzhen, where changing state-society relations; new forms of urban governance, market discourses and mechanisms; and the new social structures of the industrial village have generated particular power effects on the lives of Chinese migrant workers (i.e., peasant workers, or mingong) and their struggles. A new Chinese working class, struggling to be born alongside the Chinese socialist economy’s transformation into part of the global capitalist economy, subjected to both the workings of the invisible hand of the market and the governmentality of the state, again is specific in the form and process of its historical making in contemporary China.

Revisiting the Class Subject

E. P. Thompson, in his classic, The Making of the English Working Class argues that class formation is “an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning. The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making…. More than this, the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomize its structure…. The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context” (1963, 9). The subtitle of this chapter, “The Making and Unmaking of a New Chinese Working Class,” is a trope or an irony more than a statement. Insights from E. P. Thompson (1963) have alerted me to the need to avoid turning the real lives of Chinese workers into dead data, patterns, or structures by the enunciation of a class language. Thompson’s work makes two contributions. First, he argues against empiricist historiography, which ignores both the cultural and qualitative changes of “industrialization” and the political presence and agency of the working class. Second, he challenges the conventional materialist Marxists who would give greater priority to material determinations than to social or cultural initiatives, thus evading the complexities of agency and consciousness. Thompson offers the argument that class, far from being a structural determination, entails historical relationships, and that the making of the class was its own doing. According to Gregor McLennan (1982, 109), Thompson’s volume is history from “below” not only because culture and popular mentalities are emphasized but also because of its moral and theoretical sense. The agency and varied experiences of the working class itself provide clues for us to understand its making. Nobody except the working class itself is the agent of history.

While the agency of the working class is restored to the center, the necessary mediation between culture, agency, and the representation of the class is still seriously undertheorized by the Marxist tradition of class analysis. Thus it has been subjected to criticism from poststructuralist studies that highlight both the politics of articulation and a project of decentering the subject that work against any unified or teleologized notion of class. Here I would like to stress two points: first, the politics of articulation is always historically sited, spatially situated, and culturally mediated in a particular time and space. The field of articulation is exactly the arena where all kinds of forces-state, capital, intellectual, media related, and last but not least, the workers themselves-will intervene and strive to interpellate the nature and forms of the working class. Maoism serves as the best example to illustrate how the politics of articulation forcefully “announced” and then shaped the Chinese proletariat in the socialist period. In Maoist China, class was formed without its corresponding subjects; the interpellating power was taken over by the party machine in order to create class actors.

My second point is that inscribing class with a telos is definitely problematic but, as Thompson has shown, class is as much a concept of culture and lived experience as of historical and structural conditioning. Like the concepts of gender and ethnicity, class speaks to a set of particular human relationships that cannot be declared by a unified category or subject to be the embodiment of an essence. As Don Kalb rightly puts it, Thompson, Raymond Williams, Eric Wolf, and many others all work with a relational reading of class to evoke the “dynamic, and sometimes even contradictory intersections of culture, society, and production,” and address “their mutual determinations and conflictual interdependencies in reproducing a whole way of life” (1997, 5). Kalb holds that such a historical and relational class concept “offers the best possibilities for escaping the intellectual errors of reductionism, reification, and essentialism” as well as implying “a more open and contingent form of social class analysis”.

Accompanying a relational reading of class, there is another strong tendency to replace class as such by class struggle. McLennan (1982, 112) sharply points out that Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class, has shifted from constituting the working class to the period of “class struggle without classes,” for he holds the general view that abstract “class interests” are not fought over by classes as classes. McLennan further comments that in both The Making of the English Working Class and in Thompson’s later work, there is an affirmation of the superiority of “struggle” over “class.” Thompson is acutely aware that there were great discrepancies between the language of class and, in McLennan’s words, the “popular mentalities of subordination” that were more inclined to a traditional “moral economy”. Studies of labor strikes tend to draw the conclusion that there is no class without class struggle and it is always in the process of struggling that workers acquire class consciousness and are thus constituted as a class. Fred Chiu clearly articulates this position: “‘Class’ exists only while individual workers are intepellated and involved in a process of forming a collective identity-a particular historical moment when individuals consciously formulate moral-political positions and carry them into the battlefield of concrete struggle. At such moments-not earlier and not later-one can conceive of ‘class'” (2003, 220).

While I agree that agency, along with active participation in labor strikes or labor movements, is an indispensable part of the production of “right” moments for constituting class consciousness, it is still not justified to posit class issues as class struggle, especially reified in the form of a collective movement. In my ethnographic study of the workplace, class consciousness is also constituted through everyday practices that may be performed anytime and anywhere and as such could hardly be reduced to moments of collective class struggle. The politics of articulation, from both the dominating and the dominated sides, involve techniques of condensation, displacement, and representation that are flexibly diffused and dispersed everywhere on the shop floor, and often simultaneously entangled with the language of gender, ethnicity, and urban-rural status (Perry 1996). No class struggle does not mean that there is no class consciousness and thus no class. There is obviously no direct correspondence among these three subjects, not even in an inverse order. A distinction between class in itself and class for itself is still useful for understanding the structural constraints and historical conditioning that always work upon agency.

The problematic of class analysis in China is not simply a canonical or disciplinary issue but rather is far more political. Subjected to reductionism, reification, and essentialism, the language of class was for more than half a century strongly linked to waves of socialist movements. If we say that it was Mao’s revolutionary ideas that engendered a class struggle language in China, then it was Deng Xiaoping’s reform that announced its death by replacing a modernity discourse with a promise to allow “a proportion of people to get rich first.” “Speaking trauma” in the early 1980s, as an intellectual project to disclose the “evils” of the Cultural Revolution, helped denounce Mao and his belief in class struggle in making history. A farewell to Mao (and thus farewell to Marx) rapidly became the consensus. There is no doubt that the postsocialist party machine turned its hegemony upside down by targeting class language when the society itself was undergoing a rapid process of capitalization and when class, no longer an empty signifier, was going through a rapid process of making and remaking. The historical paradox is obvious: the Chinese Communist Party, once proclaimed as the avant-garde party of the working class, now turns the sword against its constituency. The party machine now openly and sincerely invites capitalists, businessmen, and managers-the new social classes that emerged in the reform period-to join its membership at the turn of the century.

New hegemonic blocs are forming-self-consciously pitted against the language of Marx in general and class struggle in particular-that may still shape the popular memory and history of Chinese socialism. Fashioned with a neoliberal discourse of modernity, the new hegemonic machine is geared up to denounce class as a relevant social discourse and refute Maoism, especially its tenet of perpetuating class struggle, as an obsolete and harmful mode of thought. However, it is against this paradoxical historical moment that the specters of Marx, in Jacques Derrida’s words, are returning. They have to come: as Derrida puts it, “The objection seems irrefutable. But the irrefutable itself supposes that this justice carries life beyond present life or its actual being-there, its empirical or ontological actuality: not toward death but toward a living-on” (1994, xx). This had the “visor effect: we do not see who looks at us,” but “this spectral someone other looks at us“. A new Chinese working class is struggling to be born at the moment when the language of class is curtailed and becomes inarticulate. The new working class is this spectral other, gazing at itself but expecting no one else to see it. An orphan’s fate is its misery as well as its luck. It is not only a matter of making its own, but also a struggle of life and death, a chance of incarnating this specter into life.

Making and Unmaking of Class in China

The worker’s verse on the dormitory wall denotes this class struggle for life and death-a journey of taking back its own agency and politics of articulation for making its own class. In this chapter I regard class not only as fluid historical relationships but also as specific relationships that contain many human tensions, multiple structural contradictions, and sometimes even self-defeating elements. From the start this was a difficult journey because the process of making the new working class from the bottom was countered by techniques of unmaking it from above. The technology of unmaking is as complex as the politics of making, and we must pay sufficient attention to it in the form of the historical conditions and the art of governmentality in China. Making and unmaking are two faces of the same coin as a new Chinese working class struggles to emerge in contemporary China’s rapidly globalizing society.

(Continues…)

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